Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Oldport days, with ten heliotype illustrations from views taken in Newport, R. I., expressly for this work.

[266] ferns. Or of the paths that lead beside many a little New England stream, whose bank is lost to sight in a smooth green slope of grape-vine: the lower shoots rest upon the quiet water, but the upper masses are crowned by a white wreath of alder-blooms; beside them grow great masses of wild-roses, and the simultaneous blossoms and berries of the gaudy nightshade. Or of those winding tracks that lead here and there among the flat stones of peaceful old graveyards, so entwined with grass and flowers that every spray of sweetbrier seems to tell more of life than all the accumulated epitaphs can tell of death.

And when the paths that one has personally traversed are exhausted, memory holds almost as clearly those which the poets have trodden for us, --those innumerable by-ways of Shakespeare, each more real than any high-road in England; or Chaucer's

Little path I found
Of mintes full and fennell greene;

or Spenser's

Pathes and alleies wide
With footing worne;